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bp shinners wrote:

sashafierce wrote:I hope my explanation is accurate @ Bp Shinners

Need a job teaching after you take the exam?

sashafierce wrote:

bp shinners wrote:Wow, I wish every single one of my students would do that. It's exactly what I tell them to do to get better, but most get lazy and skip writing it all out. You will absolutely improve more quickly doing that than you would just rushing through the passage, so keep it up!

Yeah its a good method for learning. How are you going to learn from your mistakes if you don't keep track of them?
It is very time consuming though but I am seeing improvement in RC.

Jeffort wrote:Quoting, bolding and super sizing this because of how profound and important it is! I often dream of a future when this will be common knowledge among students and I don't have to nag people to actually do it to see the benefit.

cahwc12 wrote:e thing you could be doing that I see some of my students doing periodically is not being confident enough in yourself to choose your answer and move on. By all means if you're between a couple answers, take the time (within reason) to get your answer. But a major problem I've seen is a student will quickly identify what is very likely to be the correct answer and then spend upwards of 1-2 extra minutes on that question trying to rule out beyond any doubt every other answer.

I call this "chasing ghosts" in RC. I'm not sure if I came up with that moniker or someone else did (probably the latter), but it's essentially when you are searching through RC for some piece of information that just isn't there. If there is no support for an answer choice, you're never going to find that 'not support' anywhere. Sometimes (often?) you'll find that an incorrect answer choice is a jumbling/scrambling/opposite of what was said. But often you'll encounter answer choices that simply have no basis. Be very, very cautious when you encounter information that you don't remember anything about. Whenever it happens to me and it actually is in the passage it's almost always early on in the passage while I'm still 'getting into gear' but most of the time, it's because that information was never there to begin with. Read carefully and trust your brain.

Being able to better recognize when these 'ghost answers' come up can save you a lot of time across a section.

Jeffort wrote:This is nothing new or different than the basic RC advice all good prep sources give that anybody that has prepped for the LSAT at least a little bit has already been told, but it is really important stuff since many people fail to do these simple basics.

It simply describes the way you are supposed to read the passage:

Read paragraph, pause, think about and determine main point(s) of that paragraph/summarize.
Read next paragraph, do the same as above.
etc. for each paragraph.

Then at the end list the main points of each of the paragraphs and think about how they relate to form the overall main point.

Go to questions.

It's the standard way you should be reading if you want to retain it well. It's the mental steps that you at first have to force yourself to do until they become habit. For some reason many people need to be told over and over that they should actually pause at the end of each paragraph and briefly think about what they just read to digest it before rushing into the next paragraph to try to quickly cram even more confusing material into their head. Many people don't force themselves to pause and think about stuff to process it while they read because they seem to think it takes too much time or some nonsense like that due to time pressure.

Read the passage to understand and remember the main points, and do that by pausing after and summarizing each paragraph as you go. Simple as that, if you don't read it that way, you'll have unnecessary trouble with the questions, so just do it.